The worst part of GenAI seems not to be AI slop (I can easily close the tab if the content isn't interesting). It's the fact that every...single...submission(!!!) on HN now has someone questioning and dissecting the content to dismiss it as AI generated.
I'd much rather people gave submissions the benefit of the doubt, or just clicked `Flag` if it is obviously worthless slop.
Disagree.
Just like those spam 'articles' that may at their core be interesting or have some value - but force you to click past 4 ads and scroll over/filter out another 17 just to extract the promised value - noticing that content you're consuming is obviously AI generated results in two things:
1. resentment that your time and attention was wasted by machine generated word-padding, and
2. a loss of confidence in the accuracy of the information presented
Then, when finally neither the topic nor the content has anything to do with AI, "It's so nice to read something on HN not mentioning AI" in the comments.
HN has made a clear decision on when AI content is acceptable on the site itself, it'd be nice if there was a clear decision on the linked content as well. Regardless whether it's the policy I'd personally prefer or not, it'd do a lot in regards to avoiding the same discussion appearing everywhere.
People question my use of AI when I double `-` with an iPhone on the internet constantly.[0] I get it, it's annoying.
However, if our barrier for quality is "at it's core, the content of this is interesting", then the quality of this place will fall off a cliff. This is factoid-level interesting. It's not a hacker writing something profound or presenting a breakthrough in garbled grade 8 English. It's a fun fact being presented in an acceptably, inoffensive, reasonably produced format.. Is that the bar?
Everything I needed to know about printf, I learned from the reference manual. Anybody could do the same. Here's a reasonable one: https://en.cppreference.com/c/io/fprintf - look, it's like 5 pages or whatever, and the last 2 are examples and xrefs. You sit there and read it 2 or 3 times and you'd be done faster than Task Manager Man can read his script.
https://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/22_c....
